Start Date
11-9-2023 3:45 PM
End Date
11-9-2023 5:00 PM
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
Rapid, human-induced climate change presents a crisis that involves everyone, yet few people feel they have any influence or ability to change seemingly unstoppable events. City Atlas developed a cooperative game, Energetic, to teach anyone in the US – or around the world – how to practice fixing climate change with accurate, updatable information, scaling from a 2.5 hour game to a month long workshop, matched to the region in which they live. The game for NYC is now used at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Brown, Vanderbilt, and Bronx Science, and at Con Ed and the NYS Dept of Energy. City Atlas is working to scale it to all NYC public high schools and expand to other major cities. In this talk, Richard will describe the development of the game and how it opened up more ideas for him about how to help overcome the social barriers that have blocked a strong response to climate change. From Fall 2023, Energetic is also being used in classes at Montclair State University.
Biography
Richard Reiss crossed over to climate change education after a career in the film industry, where he directed commercials for clients including NY State, Crest, MTV, and Showtime, and worked with talent including Patrick Stewart, Susan Sarandon, and RuPaul. While still directing, in 2006 he launched the project Artist As Citizen, to fund creative students for work on social issues. AAC’s first project was an interview and portrait with the late climate scientist Wally Broecker (Columbia University). In 2011 he co-founded City Atlas with the Institute for Sustainable Cities at Hunter College, CUNY, and in 2018 had a revelation: would a game be better than a slideshow in explaining how energy, climate, and cities are related – and in finding solutions? He has a BA in Architecture from Yale.
Additional Links
We designed a board game about the future of New York City!
Rapid, human-induced climate change presents a crisis that involves everyone, yet few people feel they have any influence or ability to change seemingly unstoppable events. City Atlas developed a cooperative game, Energetic, to teach anyone in the US – or around the world – how to practice fixing climate change with accurate, updatable information, scaling from a 2.5 hour game to a month long workshop, matched to the region in which they live. The game for NYC is now used at Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, Brown, Vanderbilt, and Bronx Science, and at Con Ed and the NYS Dept of Energy. City Atlas is working to scale it to all NYC public high schools and expand to other major cities. In this talk, Richard will describe the development of the game and how it opened up more ideas for him about how to help overcome the social barriers that have blocked a strong response to climate change. From Fall 2023, Energetic is also being used in classes at Montclair State University.